Hôtel de Rambouillet

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

The Hôtel de Rambouillet was the Paris residence of Madame de Rambouillet, who ran a renowned literary salon there from about 1607 until her death in 1665. Formerly the Hôtel de Pisani, it was situated close to the Louvre, on the site of the Palais Royal.

The quality looked for in this self-defining circle was honnêteté, a quality looked for in vain at the contemporary court, crass, ostentatious, corrupt and corrupting. Honnêteté was a mode of restraint and decorum, so practiced that it had become easy and as if natural, shared by aristocrats and fastidious members of the high bourgeoisie, but which could not readily be taught or learned. In contrast with the court, "the hôtel de Rambouillet received an elite that chose its own members, or, more precisely, whose members recognized one another's right to belong.... The ordinary rules of civility did not govern daily interchange. Members of the group wrote and above all talked to one another. Conversation was a sacred art, the forum in which the group developed its taste. L'Astrée was staged as well as read; other reading included the novels of La Calprenède and Mlle de Scudéry, which held up a mirror of this microsociety" (Revel, p 194.)

The précieux refinements of the French language would find some codification in the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française eventually published by the Académie française, which found its start in the Hôtel Rambouillet. Words like "celadon" to describe a certain range of pale glaucous blue-green glazes of Chinese porcelain come straight from the Hôtel de Rambouillet.